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I had a sublime moment the other day at gaelic playgroup. I may be the first person to have ever said that. I was staring at the Tupperware containers which hold the Grown-Up Snacks, as someone carefully filled a giant pot of what would be my first proper coffee in days, when I spotted some choco-liebniz […]

“I hope I never get used to the kind of artfully suppressed pain he faintly displayed as he told me of how he had had to leave home at eight because his family would not have been able to manage; that spooked, haunted look you catch right at the back of the eyes of so many ex-boarders which seems to simultaneously say ‘please give me a cuddle’ and ‘please don’t ever give me a cuddle'”

SOooooooooo the news is: I’ve met someone. There’s someone new in my life. Shocking I know, and even more shocking… it’s another woman. It all started, like all the best romances – even illicit, extra-marital ones –, with a poem. Then we started hanging out together. The odd coffee and sausage sandwich together here, the […]

I bumped into the Bishop of Oxford in the snack money queue at nursery the other day. You really do meet all sorts in Leith don’t you? In fact his grandson (3) has proposed to my daughter (5) so we’re practically related. Which is nice because he seems like a thoroughly good egg. The grandson. […]

It came out of nowhere. It hit us hard and we weren’t expecting it. My husband had already had a difficult few days anyway. He had been to see his mother which always involves days, if not weeks, of us fighting before hand, a challenging time while he is there and usually more fighting afterwards. […]

In the late nineteen sixties a team of sociologists lead by Royston Lambert conducted an in-depth study into boarding schools. They conducted interviews, gave out questionnaires and were shown countless diaries and personal writings, entirely voluntarily on the part of the pupils. They published an in-depth analysis of their findings, but they also published The Hothouse Society, […]

When I was at the Boarding Concern conference I went to a workshop for the wives and partners of boarding school survivors. It was pretty gruelling stuff. Lots of talk of ‘staying with the feeling’. Lots of talk of people who needed to ‘come home’. Women who had waited thirty-nine years for their husbands to show […]